Garlic Mustard

Garlic mustard is a biennial herb. It begins as a rosette of kidney-shaped garlic-smelling leaves in the first year. The second-year plants grow a stem up to 4 feet tall with triangular sharp-toothed leaves and small white four-petaled flowers in clusters at the top of the stem. The plants die after setting seed. Garlic mustard can produce several thousand seeds from one plant, and the seeds can remain viable for seven years or more. Garlic mustard can grow in dense stands covering many acres of forest understory. Now found throughout Indiana, it is a particular threat to spring wildflowers, overtopping and shading them out. Compared to the diversity of plants it eliminates, it provides little food for wildlife. <www.invasive.org>